LiveJournal Buyout Confirmed

Kingfox writes "Brad Fitzpatrick, creator of LiveJournal, finally confirms the story that was posted to Slashdot yesterday. Six Apart has purchased Danga. This means that they're moving to San Francisco, LiveJournal users are finally getting the trackback feature, but the project will stay open source, and little else will change for the end user."

Thank goodness for TrackBack

[FleaPlus]

TrackBack [wikipedia.org] is a damned handy system, which lets you see which other blogs have linked to a particular post that you've made. It's seen in many of the more "professional" blogs, and it's a great tool for finding out about commentary on your posts. I was actually thinking of ditching LiveJournal for a service which supported TrackBack, but I guess I'll now be able to stick around.

Will this affect supervision/abuse?

[Anonymous Coward]

I wonder whether this will affect the webmaster/abuse contacts' attitudes.

Speaking as someone who's had inappropriate personal information and untrue claims splattered all over the board by a malicious ex, who knew many mutual friends would see it, I was less than impressed by the LiveJournal team's response when I pointed out that defamatory/illegal content was being posted. The ex in question made that post private when I sent her a rather pointed message about it, and the LiveJournal admins then claimed that they "couldn't see private messages" and therefore couldn't investigate my claim, despite the fact that those mutual friends still had no trouble reading every false allegation.

This sort of thing seems to be a serious problem with cheap/freebie blog-hosting services: they're particularly vulnerable to malicious content. In particular, while they have all the usual problems with regulating content as any other part of the Internet, they usually lack adequate resources and/or the willingness to deal with abuse. I'm all for freedom of speech as a general principle, but all the usual legal safeguards seem to be summarily ignored here because they're just too hard to enforce with the current mechanisms, and people's lives can become very unpleasant as a result.

Story from previous day

[Anonymous Coward]

So, I guess when "sources close to Brad Fitzpatrick" said that LiveJournal was not being sold... well, not so much eh?

Nice quote

[FleaPlus]

Here's [sixapart.com] an interesting blog post by Mena, President of Six Apart. I thought the following quote was interesting in the context of the typical "bloggerz sux0r" threads you see on slashdot:

I believe that LiveJournal has, unfortunately, received a bum rap because many have considered the postings on LiveJournal to be trivial. It's sort of like a vicious circle: Journalists make fun of webloggers saying that they only post about their cats, webloggers make fun of LiveJournalers saying that they only post about high school angst and LiveJournalers make fun of webloggers saying that they are SUV-driving yuppies who think they have something important to say (and I'm generalizing). The fact is, webloggers and LiveJournalers are in essence doing the same thing: they are posting their thoughts to people who are important to them. For some webloggers, it's 100,000 people, for others it is 10. For LiveJournalers, it may be 30 people, it may be 3 (or a combination of some number).

Re:Changes

[somethinghollow]

One thing I hope they change is getting more / faster servers. That site is really slow. Sadly, all my friends blog on it. So, I have to brave the slowness every once in awhile.

Another thing that I hope they change, though it has no bearing on me since I don't blog there, is their theme system. It's pretty convoluted to learn. I don't know why they don't just let you use CSS. 90% of the custom themes I've seen could be done with the right HTML and some CSS. At least then after you spent hours working on your LJ page with CSS, you could use it in the "real world." After learning LJ formatting, all you can do is format LJ (AFAIK).

Nervous

[SmittyTheBold]

Okay, being a five-year user of LJ (user number 1112 [livejournal.com], suckers) and perm-account holder, I've got a considerable stake in all this. It makes me nervous. I'm not familiar enough with Six Apart and their treatment of MT to be confident in their ability to maintain the status quo around LJ-land. I'm afraid that the business will do what all businesses do, and eventually change from being "for the people" to being "for the profit."

There are literally hundreds of thousands of people who have put time and effort into their own little portion of the Internet, and I'm afraid that with one motion Brad's damaged their stock. The thing is - this is something Brad's been putting his life into for around six years now. If anything he's got the most to lose. (Ignoring the nice chunck of change he jsut pocketed.) Hopefully he walked into this with due diligence and maintains some official control over where LJ will head.

I suppose that's the one question I haven't seen answered - from what Brad said, it seems like he's now just an employee. Any official power he now has is ceremonial. So I hope he made the right choice.

Re:What's the business model?

[captnitro]

In addition to the "compare and contrast" contributions we'll see, it's also this: in the next decade, it will be about a return to communities on the web. In the early 90s it was a bunch of local BBSs, and now the web is too big to be a "community" most of the time. People want to reach out to other people, and blogs, for better or for worse, often do that. (For worse, I know I've made fun of blogs as a way for people to be passive-aggressive to those they don't want to talk to in person.. :)

I think Six Apart wants to be a major force in that movement, in generating communities, and how communities will play into the future of the web and how we communicate with one another. For one, LJ subscribers (myself included) will be paying Six Apart AFAIK, not Danga, so there's profit there. Also, competition; the fewer games in town, or the more that you control, the better.

On a separate note, does anybody seem to see a trend with the next 'dot-com' being funded open-source, or even just homegrown, web solutions ("we're not selling the product, we're selling the service")? It seems like I've heard of quite a few open source projects getting bank from just being good for long enough.. one clear example being Linux, but also reading Mena's blog -- (paraphrased) "me and my husband released Moveable Type in 2001, when I was 24". Now they have offices in Tokyo, Paris, and San Francisco. It seems like I need to find a killer app and a web server.